RE: Questions about Unicode history

From: Greenwood, Timothy (Timothy.Greenwood@divine.com)
Date: Thu Jan 31 2002 - 12:35:45 EST


> - When did the ISO 10646 project start?

A paper that I wrote ("International Character Sets - the 7/8 bit story") for an April 1985 conference at Digital references a note from Masami Hasegawa, the original editor of 10646. This note was dated 17 October 1984. Masami's paper "Towards Multi-Lingual Data Processing" for the same conference has the paragraph

'In the plenary meeting of TC97/SC2 of ISO, which is a sub-committee for information coding, it was decided that an International Standard is needed for a two byte graphic character set. Thus a working group WG2, two-octet graphic, was formed to write a draft proposal.'

> - When did Unicode and ISO 10646 merge?

See http://groups.google.com/groups?q=hasegawa+ISO+10646&hl=en&selm=10635%40sun103.crosfield.co.uk&rnum=2 for a report on the first (or one of the first) merger meetings.

> - When was ISO 8859 published?

The above paper has it that the ECMA standard was approved in December 1984 and that ISO and ANSI were approving it as the paper was written in early 1985.

Tim Greenwood



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